You can have an excellent idea for a product or service and still fail as a business. This is often the case for companies with non-motivated employees. Employees who do not have passion for the company and its brands can eventually lead to your eventual downfall. However, there are things you can do to help improve employee morale to keep your best and brightest motivated.
Use Positive Reinforcement
Poor employee morale may be the result of a poor management style. When employees make mistakes, they are made well aware of them in many cases. However, when employees complete their job well, they may feel that they don’t receive any recognition for their hard work. Positive reinforcement is vital in any good relationship. This should certainly be extended to your office. Giving out trophies from a trophy store for employee accomplishments may be suitable.
Give Your Employees Some Flexibility for Work-Life Balance
Sometimes it’s not the things in the office that are hurting employee morale. It’s how so much time on the clock impacts the rest of that person’s life. If someone with a young family, for example, has no time to see that family due to work, you can expect their morale to be below.
Overall, if you want happy, productive employees that stick with your company for the long term, you must provide some flexibility in allowing them to find a good life-work balance. This means allowing employees to schedule their hours to make room for family-related events. It may even mean allowing some employees to telecommute.
Give Employees Careers Instead of Just Jobs
Something crucial for retaining employees and keeping them happy is career development. No one wants to feel like they are stuck in a dead-end job with no possibility of ascending higher in their career. Make sure the path for promotion up the corporate ladder is made evident to employees at all levels within the company.
Hold to your promise and promote those that have earned it. You should also include other options for career development, such as helping fund the tuition for obtaining degrees relevant to your field. About 56 percent of employers offer such programs.
Prevent Toxic Work Environments
Sometimes employee morale is low because the environment in the office is toxic. Toxic work environments can develop for a lot of reasons. Office gossip is one common source of it. Employees becoming resentful of perceived favoritism is another possible cause. In some cases, your employees may develop factions that hate each other. If this gets bad enough, it can hamper the work of entire departments. Overall, you must root out such problems early and communicate to employees that cliquish behavior, gossiping and other forms of toxic workplace behavior will not be tolerated.
Provide the Right Benefits and Perks
Things like benefits and perks matter. They help make employees feel appreciated and help retain workers for the long term. Things like healthcare plans, pension plans, stock options and more can help make your company much more attractive to a labor market with intense competition. The little things matter too.
Providing your employees with free lunch once in a while can go further than you may expect. Also, consider what your direct competitors are offering their employees. For example, if you lag, some of your current employees may leave you for greener pastures with your competitors.
Open Up Communication
One of the biggest problems in many workplaces is the lack of communication. This can include proper communication between management and lower employees. It can include communication between departments. It can even include communication between employees in the same office.
Try to foster an environment of open communication at all levels of your company. This should include communicating information that employees perceive as unfavorable to management. Doing so will help create a more efficient company that can solve its problems before they get out of control. It can also make employees feel like the company reacts to and needs their input.
Overall, creating positive employee morale requires many different things. For example, doing things like stopping toxic workplace behavior, providing the right employee incentives and improving communication in the company can do a lot to help create positive morale.
Keep in mind that your employees are emotional creatures with needs. They shouldn’t be treated just like numbers in a spreadsheet. If you don’t keep this in mind, you may lose a lot of your employee’s overtime.